It’s a great game and I love it. But you CAN burn out on it easily. Just like any other MMO, you can get stuck in some intense grinding. The trick is to vary the missions you take and avoid those grinds as much as possible. I’ve done combat, trading, passengers, some engineering and mining, planetary landings… there’s a lot to do.
Excellent point! I enjoy this stuff, too, but I can see how it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Same with the Truck Simulator games, and flight sims.
Aaaagh. It’s not an MMO, you can barely even play with friends! But like you say, you have a ton of the drawbacks of garbage of MMOs… just with basically none of the upside.
Yeah, I couldn’t come up with another term and technically it IS a massive online game with thousands of players… you just never encounter any of them. :)
Permadeath would make the 80,000 credits seem a little more risky.
The funny thing is, being the bounty hunter is the safe route to take. Because your hold is empty, any NPC pirate will leave you alone. You get to dictate any engagement you make, and you’re also outfitted with a combat ship so when the lasers do start to fly, you’re equipped to handle it. The poor miners, on the other hand…
So not only are we left with a weird situation where the only commodity of real value in a RES are the pirates hunting after garbage/worthless resources, but the path with the least risk is going after the highest reward. Such a perfect microcosm of how bonkers the whole game is. :)
Historically, mining usually occurs in fenced-off areas with armed guards and poor living conditions. Not sure how ED could emulate that.
We’ll see what happens with mining next year. It’s undergoing a significant revision, apparently. The only mining I’ve done thus far is accidentally spraying asteroids with multi-cannons while I’m bounty hunting.
“We’re going to improve the way that you detect and extract resources,” said lead designer Sandy Sammarco. “We want to give you options and variety and choice when you’re out there in the black. Importantly, what we’re going to try and evoke is the feeling of Wild West prospecting. Whether that’s through jeopardy — through crises and challenges, unforeseen, cropping up out there in the black while you’re trying to get rewards — or through the concept of striking it big and hitting the motherlode.”
They don’t need to go that far, they could just make mining profitable. There’s absolutely no money in piracy in this game at all. The only thing of value are the bounties on the pirates, but there’s no motive for them to pirate because there’s little of value to take. So why are they pirating?
It’s not just a matter of immersion/sanity either. There’s no value in being a player pirating NPCs, despite there being mechanisms in the game to do so. It cuts off entire playstyles.
That is some of the low-hanging fruit that grinds my gears with this game. They went to great lengths to simulate the entire galaxy, but real basic fundamental stuff like that has remained senseless for years. They did the hard stuff, then proceed to ignore all the easier stuff that would have a greater impact on most of the player base.
Like @scharmers said, they’re great engineers, just utterly clueless game designers.
I just dropped this in the FDEV idea box:
It makes NO sense that Y miners mine minerals that are worth X while being hunted by Z(=3Y) Pirates that are worth B(=25X). It should be the other way 'round. X times Y should be MORE than Z times B How else would the local miner community pay for the bounties? The current situation is just not making sense at all. The numbers do not add up.
How to fix? Well one could increase Y (the number of miners) but that would make bounty hunting in the REZ tedious and/or taxing on the machinery as there would be ten times as many ships in the belt. An easier fix to make this &%$# make sense is to drastically increase X (the value of the stuff being mined) so that XY > ZB. That way it would make sense the pirates are there because they would have something worth preying on. The miners would have a reason to brave the pirates because the stuff they are getting is so valueable. And the bounties the hunters are getting would have a sensible explanation.
So there you have it FDEV. Just add a couple zeroes behind the mineral prices throughout the galaxy. No more 102c for a ton of bauxite but 10k. A ton of painite is &%#@ing jackpot worth a million or more.
Mining is boring, they should do stuff that’s fun instead
Mining is way too fiddly, basically. It definitely needs to be more profitable as well. If I’m mining I shouldn’t have to give up 4-5 different freaking equipment slots to accommodate everything, which makes my ship useless for most other endeavors.
I love mining in space games. I hate it in Elite. Hate. It’s so stupid complicated. Just lemme point a mining beam at a rock and hoover that shit into my hold.
Well they’ve already said they’re re-working mining this year, so they hear you. We’ll see how that goes. :)
I don’t think making mining 100x more profiitable will do anything except make everyone miners, since it would suddenly be by far the quickest way to make money.
Do you guys think E:D should remain a hardcore space sim, or should FDev loosen up and add more MMO-ish gamey stuff? For instance, maybe add rare random drops to mining, like a free bobblehead or unique paint job. Something to keep the motivation high, other than earning credits/rep.
I remember spending hours in WoW fishing in Dalaran to get that giant sewer rat pet, and it was quite a thrill when I got one!
omg just tagged an undiscovered planetary nebula. Now sprinting back to Colonia :) Run forrest RUN!!!
Keep it a sim, just add interesting things to do.
and fix some of the more glaring bits of bullshit, such as the economy of the belt rats.
I guess the Type-10 is available now?
Fuel rats launch mission to rescue player stranded further from civilization than any other player has ever been
The fact the Fuel Rats exist is so cool.